1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for on-line handwritten input character recognition for recognizing an on-line handwritten input character according to its strokes or by the use of a fuzzy associated memory and a recording medium for executing the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Handwritten input character recognition is broadly classified, according to the algorithm employed, into off-line character recognition, such as an OCR, in which character recognition is made after a character has been written and on-line character recognition in which information of the trajectory of handwriting is taken in to identify the character on a real time basis while a character is being written, as in the pen inputting.
In the on-line character recognition, information of the trajectory of handwriting, i.e., directional information, while a character is written is sampled, the directional information and directional information previously registered in a dictionary are compared with each other, and the character in the dictionary with the highest similarity is output as the result of the recognition.
FIG. 24 is an explanatory drawing of 16-direction encoding of a stroke in a conventional system for on-line recognition of a handwritten input character.
For example, the stroke 1 of the handwritten input character "Z" is 16-direction encoded as shown in FIG. 24(c) according to the 16-direction codes shown in FIG. 24(b) and represented by a string of codes. The string of directional codes of the input handwritten character is matched with directional codes of characters registered in a Chinese character dictionary and, thereby, the character is recognized (refer to The Journal of Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, Vol. 99, No. 926, pp. 11-14 (January 1996)).
However, there is a problem with the conventional on-line character recognition method, when the objects of recognition are set to be Chinese characters, Japanese HIRAGANAs, Japanese KATAKANAs, numerals, alphabetical (capital and small) letters, and symbols, that it is difficult to discriminate between characters directional information of the actual stroke of which are very alike. Further, in the conventional method of on-line handwritten input character recognition, since the stroke is divided into 16 directions to be converted to the 16-direction code system, a stroke in between the 16 directions cannot be represented therein and there has been a limit that further precision cannot be obtained.